tberton

That's really too bad, because the first couple episodes of The Nightly Job did a really good job of dealing with an issue in depth, I thought. It sucks that it's gone of the rails.

Well, if anybody's listening, I would be interested in joining a second game!

Okay, that's the line of thought I was on. I guess I just have to try that stuff again.

Alright, hint time again. Right now, I'm in the Petrified Forest and I think I need to get this tree machine to fall down so I can build a go-kart or something? This game is weird.

I am also interested in doing some role-playing stuff. Maybe if there's enough people we could get a second game going?

You should really check out Bitch Planet, it's great. Also, since you're into Boom!, have you checked out Lumberjanes? It's the third book I follow and I like it a lot, although I'm kind of disappointed that Brooke Allen isn't on it anymore because I love her art.

Just read the second issue of Bitch Planet. It is so good! I love this book, especially all the ancillary stuff like the essays at the back and the ads on the back cover. Between this and The Wicked + The Divine, I am so happy with comics right now.

If Brad Wardell is specifically the problem, he's Co-founder of and President of Mohawk Games, which also gives me a bit of pause.

I'm interested to hear your position on this, since defense of property rights is often something that runs counter to a lot of social justice and socialist movements, at least in my understanding.

EDIT: This is in response to Argobot. Gormongous got in there while I was posting. And said what I wanted to say better than I do. Fair enough. I may have harped the "individuality" angle too hard, because I agree with you that you can't only look at the world through the lens of your own experience. My larger point was that when you say "Things are better now than they used to be," you have to ask: what things? better how? for whom? and why does that matter? Where you come down on those questions is up to evidence and argument, but they shouldn't be pushed aside. Sorry, I don't mean to start a tangent in this thread from a tangent I started in another thread. These things are just on my mind a lot because I read about them all the dang time.

I have a ton of reading to do for school tomorrow, so I can't respond to your whole post, but I did want to take issue with this specific statement. "It is better today to be just about anyone than it was X years ago" represents the core at the problem of "progressivism" and I use that term specifically to mean "a belief that the human experience continuously improves as time advances." There have been countless books and articles tackling the issues with that belief, so I don't pretend to be able to articulate them here, but I'd like to present some food for thought, as it were. 1) By what measure do we determine that it is "better" to be somebody today than X years ago? Life span? Education? Income? I'm not saying those are bad measurements, but you have to pick measurements and whichever you pick are your to reflect a particular view of what the "good life" is. Not everybody will agree on that definition. So for people who pick different measurements, life very well might not be better. 2) To borrow a phrase from Apple Cider in another thread, the world is not a monoculture. While you may be able to prove that a given measurement of "quality of life" has improved in aggragate since a given period in the past, that will always be an aggregate figure. Aggregate measures are great for policy analysis, but people experience life individually, so telling somebody who's suffering that the world is better overall doesn't really mean much. 3) Likewise, it doesn't mean much to tell people that things were worse 100 years ago. None of us were alive 100 years ago. Again, this might be useful if your developing a theory of history (although then the previous two points come in), but it doesn't mean anything in the here and now. 4) When you say "things were better X years ago" you implicitly draw a line between then and now that connects the two in an ever-rising slope on the graph of the "good life." But that's not how things work. Even when those slopes do trend upward, they zig and zag all over the place. So 100 years ago things might have been worse by X degree. But 99 years ago, maybe they got even worse than that. And then 98 years ago, they got slightly better. Those zigs and zags are important. 5) This type of "progressivism" is also implicitly inevitable. It seems obvious to anybody that of course things are better now, in general, than they were 100 years ago. But it ignores that change only happens because people want it to. Nothing comes naturally. And thus, as I mentioned in the feminism thread, calls for civility and non-violence that cite historical progress ignore the causes of that progress, which were often quite violent. I'd like to also state that I am ardently passivist. I don't think violence is ever justified except in situations of self-defence. But I can still see the validity of criticisms of calls for non-violence from protesters, most of whom were not violent anyway or were only violent in self-defense. Also, these calls for non-violence are often against destruction of property, which I don't consider to be violence in the same way as attacking people is. EDIT: Christ, this is long, but I'd also like to respond to that quote from Soren, because while I like the sentiment behind it (and thought the article that it concluded was quite good), I think it's valuable to remember that, to a certain extent, ideology is unavoidable. You can't ever really escape the assumptions that colour your thought. You can be reflexive and self-critical, but you'll always be seeing the world through a lens and you shouldn't forget that. It's the invisible ideologies that are usually the most pernicious.

I wrote about how we should broaden our ideas of what tabletop games - and games more generally - are for a friend's blog. Sorry about the weird formatting, my next piece will hopefully not have that problem.

This is something I hadn't thought about before, but I think this statement is the perfect argument for why Majora's Mask is a better place to start the series than people give it credit for. A lot of complaints people have about Majora are a variation of "this is not what I expect from Zelda." Since it was my first 3D Zelda, I didn't have any of those expectations, so maybe I was able to better appreciate it on its own terms. It might be telling that the only Zelda I played prior to Majora was Link's Awakening, which, while very different, has a similar "puzzle-box" feeling to it. So for me, Zelda has never been "about exploring." Zelda is about environmental puzzles that become increasingly complex as you gain new abilities, because that's what Link's Awakening and Majora's Mask are about. Both have exploring, but not in the same way that the original or Ocarina or Wind Waker have it.

We seem to have moved away from the Chait discussion, but at the risk of having it flare up again, I wanted to link to Mattie Brice's latest piece. It's not a direct response to Chait's argument, but it does get to something that I was complaining about with Chait's article. The opening of the last paragraph sums it up nicely: That, to me, is the central problem with argument's like Chait's that postulate a universally accepted "liberal progressivism" that is self-evidently the correct worldview. That's not necessarily to say that that Mattie's right here (although I do lean her way more than Chait's), but that this is an argument one needs to address when thinking about "pc culture."

Thanks guys, I figured it out!

Oh man, that Dishonored comment reminded me that Nick's characterization of Majora's Mask as "Dishonored Zelda" is perfect.

Another way of expressing that issue in the piece is this: Chait is arguing that reasonable discussion is the basis for making a better society, while citing ideals that helped incite at least two violent revolutions. That's the definition of irony. Of course, reasonable discussion is still extremely valuable, but it is by no means the only historical driver of change, nor is the change that reasonable discussion drives always positive.

Damn, I'm still stuck. No idea what to do here.

Thanks for the advice! I'll noodle on it some more.

The number of weird game ideas on this cast reminded me that we really need to organize a Thumbs-inspired Game Jam, where people just make games based on the fake games discussed on the cast.

Loving the game so far, but I've barely started and I'm already stuck. I've Any hints? Don't need anything specific, I'd ljust like to know if I'm on the right track, and maybe the room I should check next.

I think you guys are overestimating how different games and movies are. Of course they're really different, but I think you can find as much difference between two given games as you can between a given game and a given movie. For instance, to name some things I've experienced recently, playing Journey feels a lot more like watching Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy than it feels like playing Threes.

As I said upthread, Majora's Mask was my first 3D Zelda. I played Link's Awakening before it and I might have played the first dungeon of Ocarina first, but Majora defines 3D Zelda for me. I don't feel my appreciation of the game or the series is any less because of that. Basically, the Giant Bomb guys don't know what they're talking about.

What becomes of Sisyphus when there is no longer a boulder to push?

After 2 days of installing, uninstalling and reinstalling drivers, with a dozen back-and-forth emails with Double Fine Support, I finally got the game working. So pumped to play it!